Understanding livestock emissions through remote monitoring of methane and livestock weights
Ashley Sweeting
Making the Complex Accessible - Sustainability | Social Impact | Innovation | MBA - Journalist
The Agscent Air GHG methane monitor incorporated into an Optiweigh automatic weigh station has now been deployed in a methane mitigation feeding trial in Kansas. The feeding trial is evaluating a feed additive that inhibits methanogenic archaea in the rumen to reduce the climate impact of livestock production.
The potential climate benefits of reducing enteric methane emissions are well known. However, there are currently few technologies that allow producers to measure and manage their herds methane emissions. Emissions can be significantly reduced through existing farm management practices such as selective breeding, feeding/grazing management, improved management of animal health, and culling of unproductive stock. However, the implementation of these management practices requires reliable and affordable technology to monitor the animal's emissions and productivity.
It is broadly acknowledged by researchers and livestock producers that methane emissions vary significantly between individual animals, different production systems and different feeding regimens. Even with similar animal in the same herd, under the same management and eating the same food methane emissions can vary enormously.
“We had cows that would emit 100g of methane per cow day and we had 500g per day from a different cow in the same herd. So that’s five times more within the same herd” Professor Itzik Mizrahi, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. The drivers of these variations are yet to be determined.
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To address these significant and yet to be understood variations in emissions much broader monitoring of animals for methane is critical.
Agscent X Optiweigh samples individual animal methane emissions and animal live weight remotely. The system can be deployed in a pasture, a feedlot, or a dairy where is automatically monitors each animal that visits the weigh station and sends the data to your laptop or phone. The self contained, solar powered system requires no additional infrastructure.
Executive Vice President / Regulatory and Government Affairs at A-Gas
1 年Thank you for this post Ashley Sweeting and please permit a bit of an analogical stretch. If this type of innovation can be applied to such diverse herds and pastures we should be able to similarly advance leak detection in the HVAC industry to limit the emissions of high GWP refrigerant gases. Innovation enables Mitigation.
President
1 年This is Scott Zimmerman, President of C-Lock Inc. Over the past 13 years, our company has gathered the largest database of cattle methane emissions in the world of MASS FLUXES from millions of animals using GreenFeed to measure methane emissions from cattle. Our data has been published in hundreds of scientific papers.??I have personally reviewed the results from every study. It is not possible that cattle emissions actually varied by five-fold between individual animals in the same herd. The variability between animals for methane fluxes on pasture should be similar as the variability between animals in body weight. For example, feed efficiency studies typically yield between animal variability in methane on roughage diets of 10%. This means the highest emitters are about 30% more than the lowest emitters. Large between-animal variability in methane emissions is a result of a poor measurement technique. For example, Sniffer techniques that only measure passive concentrations yield between animal variability 3-5 fold higher than fluxed-based methods, such as chambers, SF6, or GreenFeed. Please contact me with any questions.
ICT - Integrations Product Manager
1 年Bill Mitchell this is wild! So good to see your tech driving research like this. It's been a while since that kitchen table talk, great stuff!
Sr. Ag Operations Advisor - USDA/FAS & USAID/BHA
1 年Neat stuff, the more this tech gets out in the field (and calibrated) the better, respiration chambers will only go so far.
Working as Senior Scientist & Reproductive Biologist for Agscent, currently living in Canberra
1 年Precisely written, very good initiative...